The web based eLearning tool for practical exercises
... gives you the freedom to prepare individually at your pace and at the intensity you need. This makes the collaboration of participants with different backgrounds easy in a lab as everybody will be well-prepared for their joint practical part.
The system motivates by locking parts until everyone is prepared by checking if all team members have answered all multiple-choice-questions. This give you motivation to prepare as you know you have to do it and the others have to do it as well. Being prepared guarantees most joy for you in the team part as you can discuss about the problems you encounter there and do not have to grieve over missing preparation of your colleagues. You will see how nice it is to understand what one does and to discuss deeper aspects then just "how do we get it run".
See how the labsystem supports you as a student in doing a practical exercise.
We point you on important content. You get instant feedback on the multiple choice questions. You get quick feedback on the correction of your free-text inputs. You do not have to write a lab report. When you are done with the exercise you are done.
... support you in your individual self-learning phase by pointing you on important content in form of multiple-choice-questions. The instant feedback shows you possible problems and need for more studying immediately by just pressing the check-button. The course managers can set the amount of tries you have until you get the solution. Your result will be recorded but it is just for your information.
This way the tiring study of many information gets significantly relaxed like this. Your memorising gets strongly supported.
... let your team report the progress of your exercise while doing it. This makes additional reports obsolete saving you time. Additionally it helps you reflecting on what you do when you do it and not afterwards.
The free text inputs are shared among the team supporting your collaboration and your exchange of thoughts, ideas, and views on things.
See how the free text inputs work and how they are correlated on different machines
... allows you to point to an element of the system with just one click on the envelope next to each element.
You get linked to the email-send-page within the system where the link to your element is already in your mail body. You can add comments and send questions, remarks, or other things to other participants or instructors. This makes feedback and coordination very comfortable.
... is very neat for you and your students. You can export your whole exercise or parts of it as an ePub. There is no need for special editing from your side. The system takes care of everything. It even controls that your students can only download parts they are currently allowed to see. So everyone gets his individual ePub to read it where no Internet is available or as he finds it more convenient.
With the ePub export your students literally get their virtual course book.
When you want to know how it works just click on the ePub icon (
Here you can find a video on the ePub feature
The better your exercises are the less time your tutors will have to spend on live tutoring. What they will always spend a lot of time with is correcting your student's free-text inputs.
This screencast shows functionality that supports the tutors in their work.
You see how to temporally hide the example solutions which is useful when students are around. You see the correction features including an explanation about our workflow.
The most important thing for the correction is the strong support for cross-correction. Cross-correction makes your exercise scale as additional teams do not mean linearly increasing workload on the correctors.
Also important is the identical view to the one of the students. Your tutors always have everything visible and available the students have giving them a great overview on what was given and what was asked.
... let you set and organise the links in your courses menu individually. You can even set access rights to links that show the links only to the user groups you specify.
See here where the menu is stored and how it is created when you spawn a new instance.
... lets you import existing courses from our portal soon. You can also export and share your courses.
If you want to see the XML export working have a look at this video.
... allows you to assign users to different courses where they can use their single account. The user management supports the users by retrieving passwords and changing their account data by themselves. You can fully customise the data you want to collect from your users. This makes it possible to collect which team partners students want to have, which semester they are, etc.
Removing users and changing the password reminder mail text is shown here.
... allows you to give your students additional information before registering to the course. The registration process shows graphically how many places are left (fully customisable by you in the configuration file). The students automatically receive their login credentials and can log on the user administration system. As this system is a regular instance of the labsystem you can add course material there already giving the students instant access to information like basic tutorials or further information.
You can fully customise the emails the system sends automatically from within the system.
See how the registration works
... makes the system keep track of the points of your students. You can see detailed statistics in a graphical format.
The system shows your students their credits and lets them know how well they performed in comparison to other students without making the scores available. This is an additional motivation and self-estimation support.
... allows you to manage your labs (courses) directly from the web interface. So you do not have to log on the web server to set up new courses or change the settings. The configuration files are commented and self-explaining.
... allows you to share configuration settings over courses. This makes the setup of courses much clearer and saves you time significantly each time you set up a course or you have to change a setting in multiple courses.
... is directly integrated in the system. According to the rights you set only individuals or all participants can send mails to each other or to the instructors.
The system allows to send round mails, ask for support, or just coordinate about things like free testbeds or the (missing) progress of teammates from within the system for logged in registered users.
... of couses allows to easily combine and reuse elements like texts or questions in different courses. It also allows to easily create and use templates. Authoring is very comfortable in the labsystem.
See a video about creating a new course
...is very handy when editing plain HTML code within the labsystem. Plain HTML is one of the supported markup languages that can be used for authoring content within the labsystem
tidy automatically formats and corrects HTML code on input. To see how it works
watch this video.
... supports you with functionality similar to tidy but for CSS. When the plugin is
installed, the labsystem automatically corrects and formats your CSS code. CSS code can be
authored from within the labsystem's user interface. This gives you huge freedom in designing
your content.
You can find more information about CSS tidy here: http://csstidy.sourceforge.net
If you want to see how CSS tidy acts within the labsystem
watch this screencast.
... helps you uploading content like pictures, zip archives, etc. The system organises them and you can easily integrate them into your authored content.
If you are interested in how it works, watch this video.
The labsystem is also a CMS. You have basic elements (pages for text, inputs and multiple-choice questions) that you can group in containers and labs.
This page consists of different pages within different containers for instance. You can set the visibility rights for all elements. Like that you can show information like solutions after the schedule ended for instance or give information to correctors and not participants for instance.
This screencast shows the possibilities. If it does not sound intuitive to you just play around a little with the visibilities and they will be familiar to you soon.
... is very neat for you and your students. You can export your whole exercise or parts of it as an ePub. There is no need for special editing from your side. The system takes care of everything. It even controls that your students can only download parts they are currently allowed to see. So everyone gets his individual ePub to read it where no Internet is available or as he finds it more convenient.
With the ePub export your students literally get their virtual course book.
When you want to know how it works just click on the ePub icon
(
Here you can find a video on the ePub feature
See also here.
...make the setup of the labsystem very comfortable and easy. You just need a xAMP system. We usually use LAMP with Ubuntu or another Linux derivate, apache (which you can replace by other web servers like lighttp if you like), MySQL (which you could replace by other DBs by changing the interface class of the system), and PHP (from 5 n with support for tidy).
Then check out the repository and run the interactive installation script.